About this item
"A whole book devoted exclusively to the misconduct of American presidents and their responses to charges of misconduct is without precedent." - from the introduction to the 1974 edition by C. Vann Woodward, Pulitzer Prize-winning Yale historianThe historic 1974 report for the House Committee on the Judiciary, updated for today by leading presidential historiansIn May 1974, as President Richard Nixon faced impeachment following the Watergate scandal, the House Judiciary Committee commissioned a historical account of the misdeeds of past presidents. The account, compiled by leading presidential historians of the day, reached back to George Washington's administration and was designed to provide a benchmark against which Nixon's misdeeds could be measured.
About the Author
I am a Yale graduate and received my Ph.D. in history from Columbia University, where I studied with Richard Hofstadter. My first and only full-time academic position was in the history department of Princeton University from 1966 to 1980, which I left to found the American Association for the Advancement of the Humanities. During those years, I held a Guggenheim Fellowship, was a fellow of the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History at Harvard, and served as a member of the board of directors of the American Council of Learned Societies. More recently, I was Fulbright Visiting Professor of American History at Charles University, Prague. As a historian, I have of course written books and articles about the past, as well as about education and public affairs. Those books include To the Hartford Convention: The Federalists and the Origins of Party Politics in Massachusetts, 1789-1815 (Knopf, 1969) ; with James M. McPherson et al., Blacks in America: Bibliographical Essays (Doubleday: 1971) ; with F. Sheldon Hackney and Barton J. Bernstein, Understanding the American Experience (2 vols; Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1973) ; ed. with John R. Gillis, Becoming Historians (University of Chicago Press, 2009) ; ed. A Century of American Historiography (Bedford/St. Martin's, 2009) ; and, most recently, Being a Historian: An Introduction to the Professional World of History (Cambridge University Press, 2012) . But having been a teacher all my life in schools and universities, starting when I served in the U.S. Army in France in the late 1950s, I have also thought hard about teaching and learning, which led to two books which I co-authored with Harold C. Cannon, a classicist. Those books are The Elements of Teaching and The Elements of Learning (Yale University Press, 1997 and 1999) . I was also, with Joyce Appleby, a co-founder of the History News Service, an informal syndicate of historians who write op-ed pieces, as well as one of the moving spirits behind the founding of the National History Center, an initiative of the American Historical Association. I am now writing a book on revisionist history tentatively entitled "Battles Over the Past: Revisionist History--What It Is, Why We Have It" and hoping for a New York production of a play, "Good and Faithful Servants," drawn from the correspondence between John and Abigail Adams and Thomas Jefferson. (June 2013)
